A blog hosted by the Right Honorable The Earl of Stirling, hereditary Governor & Lord Lieutenant of Canada, Lord High Admiral of Nova Scotia. Covers diverse topics including European and North American politics and economics, strategy, war, religion, high technology, End Times, medicine, Scotland, Scottish clans, Scots Peerage Law, and more.

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Lord Stirling's News Blog EUROPE

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I am going to limit my posts today because I am focusing on the tie-in between the global banksters and the ever worsting food shortages. Please see the articles linked below and begin to connect the pieces. Keep in mind, that the same global banking cartel forces that are literally 'playing hell' with the food market were deeply involved with BP and the BP Oil Disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, that has caused massive climate changes. Many say that the BP Oil Disaster could not have been an accident based on trades made by insiders in BP and Goldman Sachs and other big banks, shortly before the BP Oil Disaster happened. Food can be a powerful weapon. The killing of seven million people in the Ukraine, one of the most productive food growning areas on Earth was a man created event organized by the communists, that the parents/grand-parents of the global banking families today placed in power in the 20s and 30s in what became the Soviet Union. We need to ask ourselves, what is really happening today. And we must look at the history that these same banking families have brought us to, in order to begin to understand the truly massive and horrific nature of what we are facing in the next year or two. However, even that picture is not the full measure of the horror facing us. We not only have a new Global Depression that is on the brink of exploding into something far far worse, and this evolving food mega-crisis, but events in the Middle East and globally that strongly indicate that the Third World War will soon be upon us. People, prepare yourselves. First and foremost get right with God for this is most of all a Spiritual Battle, secondly stock up on food, water, and other necessities while you still can. Stirling

Lord Stirling is available for newspaper, radio and television interviews and public speaking engagements. Contact him at FAX in USA 812.491-3712 or via email at earlofstirling@yahoo.com

Ancient Scottish Barony Title for sale. There are about 100 Scottish feudal baronies that still exist; only a handful are from the very ancient Baronage of the Isles, as this one is. In a time of economic crisis, it pays to put some of your wealth into important artwork, properties, etc. of rare value. This is one of the most rare things that can be purchased and held. For sale at US$150,000 ~ link

Royal Burgh of Stirling Pipe Band at Stirling Castle ~ link ~ Official site ~ link

Hezbollah-backed Najib Mikati appointed Lebanese Prime Minister ~ link ~Lebanon's president has appointed Najib Mikati, who is backed by the Shia Islamist group Hezbollah and its allies, as prime minister-designate The move came despite demonstrations by thousands of supporters of outgoing Prime Minister Saad Hariri in the city of Tripoli as part of a "day of rage".Smaller protests were also reported in the capital, Beirut, and elsewhere. Mr Hariri has condemned acts of violence.

During consultations with President Michel Suleiman on Tuesday, 68 out of 125 members of parliament expressed support for Mr Mikati, a billionaire Sunni businessman who served briefly as premier in 2005. After his appointment, Mr Mikati said he hoped the new government would serve all of Lebanon, and protect its unity and sovereignty. "This does not signal the victory of one camp over another," he told reporters. "This is the victory of consensus over difference."

Egypt protests: Clashes in Cairo on 'day of revolt' with video ~ link ~ This was a massive protest that called for revolution and took the police force by surprise. This could get interesting. Stirling

Police in Cairo have been using tear gas and water cannon to try to quell rare anti-government protests. Thousands have joined the protests after an internet campaign inspired by the uprising in Tunisia. They marched through Cairo and other areas chanting anti-government slogans, after activists called for a "day of revolt" in a web message. Weeks of unrest in Tunisia eventually toppled President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali earlier this month. Protests are uncommon in Egypt, which President Hosni Mubarak has ruled since 1981, tolerating little dissent.

The BBC's Jon Leyne in Cairo said rallies had been held in several parts of the capital, and the turnout had been more than the organisers could have hoped. Police were taken aback by the anger of the crowd and let protesters make their way to the parliament building, he says. There police regrouped in full riot gear with tear gas and water cannon and temporarily drove the crowd back. However, protesters threw stones and stood their ground, pushing the police back until they were on the run. Our correspondent says there was a lot of of blood but no sound of gunfire. The scale of the clashes will surely come as a shock to President Mubarak, he adds. Protests also broke out in other areas, including the eastern city of Ismailiya and the northern port city of Alexandria. In Alexandria, witnesses said thousands joined the protests, some chanting: "Revolution, revolution, like a volcano, against Mubarak the coward."

The Holocaust and Holodomor ~ link ~ This is what the Zionist global banking cartel-backed communists did to the people of the Ukraine. Be advised that they could do the same to the people of America and the west. Stirling

Needless to say, history has, once again, been suppressed and rewritten through Jewish control of our media and educational institutions because, as we all know, truth hurts.

International newspapers carried stories of these events at the time but between apathy , preparations for World War II, and the ever present threats of anti semitism, they were pushed into the background.The bigger the hidden truths, the more it hurts.

You will read here nothing of Palestine but you will learn much about the history of the their oppressors and just what they are capable of regarding the food issue, they have been, according to these facts, been rather restrained in their treatment of the Palestinian people.

This is what the Jew Leib Bronstein (also known as Lev Trotsky) was preparing for the Russians:

"We should turn Her (Russia) into a desert populated with white Niggers. We will impose upon them such a tyranny that was never dreamt by the most hideous despots of the East. The peculiar trait of that tyranny is that it will be enacted from the left rather than the right and it will be red rather than white in color. Its color will be red literally because we would spill such torrents of blood that they will pale all human losses of the capitalist wars and make (the survivors) shudder. The largest overseas banks will cooperate with us most closely. If we win the Revolution and squash Russia, on the funeral pyres of its remains we will strengthen the power of Zionism and become a power the whole world would drop in the face of on its knees. We will show (to the world) what real power means. By way of terror and blood baths we will bring the Russian intelligentsia into a state of total stupor, to idiocy, to the animal state of being.... And so far our young men dressed in leather ~ the sons of watch repair men from Odessa and Orsha, Gomel and Vinnitza ~ oh, how beautifully, how brilliantly do they master hatred of everything Russian! With what a great delight do they physically destroy the Russian intelligentsia ~ officers, engineers, teachers, priests, generals, agronomists, academicians, writers!" ~ (Secret Forces in History of Russia. U.K. Begunov 1995, p 148)

During the 1918-1923 Civil War, the Bolsheviks mercilessly killed those opposed to Communism and committed acts of excessive savagery intended to instill fear. Historian Eustace Mullins had this to say:

"The orgy of murder, torture and pillage which followed the Jewish triumph in Russia has never been equaled in the history of the world...

The Jews were free to indulge their most fervent fantasies of mass murder of helpless victims. Christians were dragged from their beds, tortured and killed.

Some were actually sliced to pieces, bit by bit, while others were branded with hot irons, their eyes poked out to induce unbearable pain....

Some were nailed to the ceiling by their fingers or by their feet, and left hanging until they died of exhaustion....

Others were chained to the floor and hot lead poured into their mouths.

Many were tied to horses and dragged through the streets of the city, while the mob attacked them with rocks and kicked them to death."

Pregnant Christian women were chained to trees and their babies cut out of their bodies." ~ Eustace Mullins, The Secret Holocaust

A particularly relevant parallel to the Nazi holocaust is the Ukrainian holodomor of 1932-33, a state-created famine ~ not a crop failure ~ that killed an estimated five million people in the Ukraine, one million in the Caucasus, and one million elsewhere after the Soviet state confiscated the harvest at gunpoint. Throughout the famine, the state continued to export grain to pay for industrialization. See Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (Oxford University Press, 1987). Norman Davies gives the following description in Europe: A History, p. 965 (Oxford University Press, 1996). His first paragraph assembles quotations from Conquest; the bracketed phrase is his own:

“A quarter of the rural population, men, women and children, lay dead or dying” in “a great stretch of territory with some forty million inhabitants,” “like one vast Belsen.” “The rest, in various stages of debilitation,” “had no strength to bury their families or neighbours.” “[As at Belsen] well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.”

All food stocks were forcibly requisitioned; a military cordon prevented all supplies from entering; and the people were left to die. The aim was to kill Ukrainian nationhood, and with it the “class enemy.” The death toll reached some 7 million. The world has seen many terrible famines. . . . But a famine organized as a genocidal act of state policy must be considered unique.

Global Poverty, Food Riots, and the Economic Crisis ~ link ~ Those who are ignorant of history are doomed to repeat it! Read the above story and then this story. Wake up people, while you still can! The forces of Satan are hard at work and they intend to create the greatest nightmare of human history in the days, weeks, and months ahead. Stirling

As Tunisia's government collapsed under the protests of its citizens, in part spurred on by dramatically increasing food prices, with protests spreading to more countries in the region and around the world, this excerpt from the most recent publication by Global Research, "The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century," provides an insight into the background of the current crisis:

The Outbreak of Famine

The sugar-coated bullets of the “free market” are killing our children. The act to kill is instrumented in a detached fashion through computer program trading on the New York and Chicago mercantile exchanges, where the global prices of rice, wheat and corn are decided upon.

People in different countries are being impoverished simultaneously as a result of a global market mechanism. A small number of financial institutions and global corporations have the ability to determine the prices of basic food staples quoted on the commodity exchanges, thereby directly affecting the standard of living of millions of people around the world.

This process of global impoverishment has reached a major turning point, leading to the simultaneous outbreak of famines in all major regions of the developing world.

Famine is the result of a process of “free market” restructuring of the global economy which has its roots in the debt crisis of the early 1980s. It is not a recent phenomenon associated with the 2008-2009 economic crisis, as suggested by several Western analysts.

Poverty and chronic undernourishment are pre-existing conditions. The dramatic hikes in food and fuel prices which preceded the 2008-2009 financial crash contributed to exacerbating and aggravating the food crisis. These price hikes, which reached their peak in July 2008, have hit the market for basic food staples, including domestic retail prices, in all regions of the world.

Protest movements directed against the hikes in the prices of food and gasoline erupted simultaneously in different regions of the world. The conditions are particularly critical in Haiti, Nicaragua, Guatemala, India and Bangladesh:

Food prices in Haiti had risen on average by 40 percent in less than a year, with the cost of staples such as rice doubling... In Bangladesh [in late April 2008] some 20 000 textile workers took to the streets to denounce soaring food prices and demand higher wages. The price of rice in the country has doubled in the past year [2007-2008], threatening the workers, who earn a monthly salary of just $25, with hunger. In Egypt, protests by workers over food prices rocked the textile center of Mahalla al-Kobra, north of Cairo [April 2008], with two people shot dead by security forces. Hundreds were arrested, and the government sent plainclothes police into the factories to force workers to work. Food prices in Egypt have risen by 40 percent in the past year... [2007-2008] Earlier this month [April 2008] in the Ivory Coast, thousands marched on the home of President Laurent Gbagbo, chanting “we are hungry” and “life is too expensive, you are going to kill us.”

Similar demonstrations, strikes and clashes have taken place in Bolivia, Peru, Mexico, Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Yemen, Ethiopia, and throughout most of sub-Saharan Africa.[1]

Spiraling food and fuel prices in Somalia in 2008 contributed to precipitating an entire country into a situation of mass starvation, coupled with severe water shortages. A similar and equally serious situation prevails in Ethiopia. But now with food costs spiraling out of reach and the livestock that people live off of dropping dead in the sand, villagers across this sun-blasted landscape say hundreds of people are dying of hunger and thirst:

Many Somalis are trying to stave off starvation with a thin gruel made from mashed thorn-tree branches called jerrin. Some village elders said their children were chewing on their own lips and tongues because they had no food. The weather has been merciless – intensely hot days, followed by cruelly clear nights.[2]

This is a catastrophe in the making; we have time to act before it becomes a reality. The cost of food [in Somalia and the Afar region of Ethiopia] has escalated by up to 500 percent in some places... People are increasingly becoming desperate... We fear that the worst could be yet to come as the crisis deteriorates across East Africa.[3]

Other countries which were affected by spiraling food prices in 2007-2008 include Indonesia, the Philippines, Liberia, Egypt, Sudan, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Kenya and Eritrea, a long list of impoverished countries, not to mention those under foreign military occupation including Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine.

While the price of food commodities declined markedly in the wake of the 2008 financial collapse, the underlying mechanisms of manipulation of world commodity prices by powerful corporate interests and institutional speculators has remained functionally intact. A new wave of speculative trade in food staples and fuel cannot be ruled out.

The media has casually misled public opinion on the causes of the 2005-2008 price hikes, focusing almost exclusively on issues of costs of production, climate and other factors which result in reduced supply and which might contribute to boosting the price of food staples. While these factors may come into play, they are of limited relevance in explaining the impressive and dramatic surge in commodity prices.

Spiraling food prices are in large part the result of market manipulation. They are largely attributable to speculative trade on the commodity markets. Grain prices are boosted artificially by large scale speculative operations on the New York and Chicago mercantile exchanges. It is worth noting that in 2007, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), merged with the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), forming the largest worldwide entity dealing in commodity trade, including a wide range of speculative instruments (options, options on futures, index funds, etc).

Speculative trade in wheat, rice or corn can occur without the presence of real commodity transactions. The institutions speculating in the grain market are not necessarily involved in the actual selling or delivery of grain. The transactions may use commodity index funds which are bets on the general upward or downward movement of commodity prices. A “put option” is a bet that the price will go down, a “call option” is a bet that the price will go up. Through concerted manipulation, institutional traders and financial institutions make the price go up and then place their bets on an upward movement in the price of a particular commodity.

Speculation generates market volatility. In turn, the resulting instability encourages further speculative activity. Profits are made when the price goes up. Conversely, if the speculator is short-selling the market, money will be made when the price collapses.

Food Speculation: 'People Die From Hunger While Banks Make a Killing on Food' ~ link ~

Just under three years ago, people in the village of Gumbi in western Malawi went unexpectedly hungry. Not like Europeans do if they miss a meal or two, but that deep, gnawing hunger that prevents sleep and dulls the senses when there has been no food for weeks.

Oddly, there had been no drought, the usual cause of malnutrition and hunger in southern Africa, and there was plenty of food in the markets. For no obvious reason the price of staple foods such as maize and rice nearly doubled in a few months. Unusually, too, there was no evidence that the local merchants were hoarding food. It was the same story in 100 other developing countries. There were food riots in more than 20 countries and governments had to ban food exports and subsidise staples heavily.

The explanation offered by the UN and food experts was that a "perfect storm" of natural and human factors had combined to hyper-inflate prices. US farmers, UN agencies said, had taken millions of acres of land out of production to grow biofuels for vehicles, oil and fertiliser prices had risen steeply, the Chinese were shifting to meat-eating from a vegetarian diet, and climate-change linked droughts were affecting major crop-growing areas. The UN said that an extra 75m people became malnourished because of the price rises.

But a new theory is emerging among traders and economists. The same banks, hedge funds and financiers whose speculation on the global money markets caused the sub-prime mortgage crisis are thought to be causing food prices to yo-yo and inflate. The charge against them is that by taking advantage of the deregulation of global commodity markets they are making billions from speculating on food and causing misery around the world.

There has always been modest, even welcome, speculation in food prices and it traditionally worked like this. Farmer X protected himself against climatic or other risks by "hedging", or agreeing to sell his crop in advance of the harvest to Trader Y. This guaranteed him a price, and allowed him to plan ahead and invest further, and it allowed Trader Y to profit, too. In a bad year, Farmer X got a good return but in a good year Trader Y did better.

When this process of "hedging" was tightly regulated, it worked well enough. The price of real food on the real world market was still set by the real forces of supply and demand.

But all that changed in the mid-1990s. Then, following heavy lobbying by banks, hedge funds and free market politicians in the US and Britain, the regulations on commodity markets were steadily abolished. Contracts to buy and sell foods were turned into "derivatives" that could be bought and sold among traders who had nothing to do with agriculture. In effect a new, unreal market in "food speculation" was born. Cocoa, fruit juices, sugar, staples, meat and coffee are all now global commodities, along with oil, gold and metals. Then in 2006 came the US sub-prime disaster and banks and traders stampeded to move billions of dollars in pension funds and equities into safe commodities, and especially foods.

"We first became aware of this [food speculation] in 2006. It didn't seem like a big factor then. But in 2007/8 it really spiked up," said Mike Masters, fund manager at Masters Capital Management, who testified to the US Senate in 2008 that speculation was driving up global food prices. "When you looked at the flows there was strong evidence. I know a lot of traders and they confirmed what was happening. Most of the business is now speculation – I would say 70-80%."

Masters says the markets are now heavily distorted by investment banks: "Let's say news comes about bad crops and rain somewhere. Normally the price would rise about $1 [a bushel]. [But] when you have a 70-80% speculative market it goes up $2-3 to account for the extra costs. It adds to the volatility. It will end badly as all Wall Street fads do. It's going to blow up."

The speculative food market is truly vast, agrees Hilda Ochoa-Brillembourg, president of the Strategic Investment Group in New York. She estimates speculative demand for commodity futures has increased since 2008 by 40-80% in agricultural futures.

But the speculation is not just in staple foods. Last year, London hedge fund Armajaro bought 240,000 tonnes, or more than 7%, of the world's stocks of cocoa beans, helping to drive chocolate to its highest price in 33 years. Meanwhile, the price of coffee shot up 20% in just three days as a direct result of hedge funds betting on the price of coffee falling.

Olivier de Schutter, UN rapporteur on the right to food, is in no doubt that speculators are behind the surging prices. "Prices of wheat, maize and rice have increased very significantly but this is not linked to low stock levels or harvests, but rather to traders reacting to information and speculating on the markets," he says.

1 comment:

Iceland: Another Wonderful Revolution! ... 93% of the people Impose Non-reimbursement of banks! ...

Peaceful revolution in Iceland Media blackout

Incredible as it may seem, a revolution takes place democratic and anticapitalist Iceland right now, and no one speaks, no media is relaying the information, you will not find almost no trace on "Google" Briefly, total blackout.

Yet the nature of current events in Iceland is staggering:

People who hunt a right peacefully to power in besieging the presidential palace, a "left" liberal alternative also ousted "responsibilities" because it intended to take the same policy as the right, a referendum imposed by the People to determine whether to repay or not the banks capitalists who have sunk their irresponsibility by the country into crisis, a victory to 93% requiring the non-reimbursement of banks, nationalization of banks, and the culmination of this process many aspects of "revolutionary": the election of a Constituent Assembly November 27, 2010, charged with writing the new basic laws which now translate the popular anger against capitalism, and aspirations of people to another company. ....

About Me

I hold several ancient Scottish titles, Earl of Stirling, Viscount of Canada, Viscount of Stirling, Lord Alexander of Tulibody (1630), Lord Alexander of Tulibody (1633), etc., Chief of Clan Alexander, I also hold several honorific old Canadian great offices-of-state: Lord Lieutenant and Governor of Canada, Lord High Admiral of Nova Scotia, Lord Lieutenant of Nova Scotia, Lt.-Gen. of Nova Scotis (first Lord Stirling was founder of English speaking Canada in the early 1600s). I hold 3 degrees: B.Sc. in Pol. Sc. & History; M.A. in European Studies; B.Sc. in Education. I have worked on 3 addtional degrees: M.T.S. (theology); LL.B. (English Law); M.S. (Criminal Justice). I am former Scottish Editor at Burke's Peerage in London. I also hold several Scots/Canadian feudal titles. I am a widower. I have a published book, CASH FOR PEERAGES: THE SMOKING GUN, www.lulu.com/content/953682 .
I am available for public speaking engagements. Please contact me at: earlofstirling@yahoo.com